ktallett 3 minutes ago | next |

Whilst it was an interesting read, it still doesn't quite state why they believed he was cheating and what methods are taken on deciding that. Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.

hilux 3 hours ago | prev |

Very interesting read.

I don't play video games, but I do play online chess, and in online chess, there is a huge epidemic of cheating. Many cheaters are banned by chess.com. Some of these bans go unnoticed, but in other cases, the cheaters passionately insist that they were not cheating. And I don't believe them.

In a minuscule number of cases, chess.com has been known to reverse a ban. But chess.com does not provide the details of their anti-cheating technology.

So in the arena of chess, I do side with the provider, because as a practical matter, I believe they are almost always (>99.9%) correct. Of course, they still suffer from false negatives, because intermittent cheating is virtually impossible to prove.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from the article.

ktallett a minute ago | root | parent | next |

Why do you believe they are almost always right? Without understanding the anti cheating technology, I feel it's impossible to judge.

strken 8 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I had the interesting experience of being banned from a Call of Duty 4 server, back when the franchise still had servers.

It happened like this: we were playing the game mode Sabotage, and it went into overtime. When this happens, the game shows the exact location of every player on the map to every other player and prevents respawns until there's nobody left on one team, at which point the other wins. In CoD you can shoot through walls with a damage penalty on your shots depending on how penetrative your weapon is, and I was carrying a heavy semi-auto sniper rifle with a short range scope.

It was down to me and another player. The other player was running up some stairs inside a building, to try to get a more advantageous route to the alley where I was lurking. I popped around the corner with the intent to spam my entire ammo reserve through the wall at him, knowing I could take advantage of a body shot to chase him and probably finish him off. By some combination of map knowledge and sheer luck, my first shot hit him exactly in the head and killed him, while my entire team was spectating me. The game instantly stopped and they couldn't see any evidence I was planning on magdumping through the wall. I was pretty much instantly kicked and banned.

This has given me a lot of empathy for accused cheaters. If you're getting 10,000 kills in a year and the average player can tell whether kills are hacking with 99.9% accuracy, you're going to have 10 "ban-worthy" kills every year. I've got no idea how the numbers shake out for chess, but I would be surprised if there were zero or negligible false positives.

arp242 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

I don't play online games either (or chess, for that matter), but as I understand it quite a lot of the anti-cheat tools work by trying to detect if cheating software is running. Since it's trivial to modulate the exact hash of a .exe, it works by heuristics, similar to anti-virus software. False positives with this are not uncommon, just as false positives in anti-virus isn't uncommon.

This is different from chess.com, which looks purely at the in-game behaviour. Chess cheating is probably a lot easier to detect reasonably reliably, as it's so much more limited: you just have a 8x8 grid, limited game pieces, clearer win and lose conditions, etc.

So in short, I don't think the situations are really comparable.